Silvio D'Arzo

Contenuto

from Publisher Weekly, 1995

Review from Publishers Weekly, 09/04/1995
"The House of others"
from "Powells.com"

Botsford has unearthed some small jewels, although they are slightly dusty with age. Silvio d'Arzo was the pen name of Ezio Comparoni, a writer who during his brief life (1920-52) rarely left the town of Reggio Emilia. His simple stories reflect that provincial Italian life, but also reveal a keen style. The title story is narrated by a village priest who is shocked when an elderly woman inquires about the Church's exceptions to divorce. Slowly, it becomes clear that her real, more radical, question is about suicide. In the melancholy ``Elegy for Signora Nodier,'' a woman who married late in life retires to the countryside with her new husband and his dog, only to have him leave for a war and perish. As in all these stories, the interest lies in the halting telling and a narrative voice that assumes that everyone is aware of the happenings in a small town. In ``A Moment of This Sort,'' a schoolteacher has a meaningful encounter with an unsavory local character, then studiously avoids him. There's a shrewdness to much of d'Arzo's writing, such as ``Our Monday, a Preface,'' in which the narrator's description of life as a soldier and prisoner of war is deliberately mundane. ``The wonder of it is,'' he says at the end, ``they sent us home without reimbursing us for our tickets.'' Botsford provides the clean translation that d'Arzo's subtle writing demands. (Oct.)